In 2010 Fayre Makeig received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for a selection of Hushang Ebtehaj’s free verse. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children, two and under, and supports family as a line editor of banal bureaucratese and academic claptrap. She loves spring.

Angelo Verga has been widely published, translated, and anthologized. A former owner of, also longtime literary curator at The Cornelia Street Cafe, Verga has helped to promote poetry as a​​ popular and much-needed art form. His seventh book of poems is Long & Short, including The Street in Your Head (2016) and is available on Amazon.

Sahar Muradi is a writer and performer born in Afghanistan and raised in the U.S. / is co-editor, with Zohra Saed, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature / is co-founder of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association / has published in Drunken Boat, dOCUMENTA, phati’tude, Green Mountains Review, elsewhere literary magazine, Bone Bouquet, and The Poetry Project Newsletter / is a Kundiman Poetry Fellow, an AAWW Open City Fellow, and twice recipient of the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award in Poetry / has an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, an MPA in international development from NYU, and a BA in creative writing from Hampshire College / directs the poetry programs at City Lore / and believes in the bottom of the rice pot.

Ravi Shankar is an award-winning poet, editor, translator and professor of writing who founded the international online journal of the arts Drunken Boat, and has published or edited 10 books and chapbooks of poetry. His most recent collection is “What Else Could it Be: Ekphrastics and Collaborations.”

Soraya Shalforoosh’s first collection of poetry, This Version of Earth was published by Barrow Street in November 2014. Soraya has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series, and has had poems and reviews in Tribes.org, Good Foot, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Skanky Possum, Bomb Magazine, Marlboro Review, WSQ, Can We Have Our Ball Back.com, Shampoo Poetry, Brink: An Anthology of Post Modern American Poetry, Four Corners, Salonika, etc. Soraya has her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University, won first place in the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. Ms Shalforoosh has been a Writer in Residence at William Paterson University in NJ, a guest poet at Berkeley College in New York, guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria. Soraya has performed her poetry with jazz, blues and world music bands in clubs, universities and Central Park.